Charlie Kirk Murder, Assassination Culture in America, Jimmy Kimmel Suspended, Ellison Media Empire

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Okay, everybody, there's no easy way to start today's show. Eight days ago, Charlie Kirk was savagely murdered while doing what Americans love to do, debate. And when someone is senselessly killed like this, especially at a young age and at the hands of another human, try to make sense of it. That's only natural. And it's hard to imagine anything worse than a young father of two, just 31 years old and entering the best and most productive years of his life being killed by a 22-year-old who's barely out of adolescence.
Our hearts go out to the Kirk family, his friends, fans and every American who understands that no one should be killed for expressing their beliefs. That's the core of the great American experiment. So let's keep that experiment alive today and the memory of Charlie Kirk by continuing the great debate. Besties, there's a lot to process here as a community, a country, a society. And I just want to check everybody's temperature at the top of the program. We're obviously not going to do a cold open here because that would be inappropriate. But Chamath, how are you processing the last eight days?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:06)
I actually wrote down something as well, which I normally don't do. I just like to kind of react, but let me just read that and then maybe we can just talk from there. So to me, what Tyler Robinson illustrates is the emergence of a lost generation that was shaped by COVID. I see years of isolation, a reliance on screens, and an immersion in online subcultures that have created a vacuum where some young men are drifting in without any grounding. No institutions, no friends, no communities, no family. And out of that void, I think what comes out can at best only be called ideological incoherence. Somebody used the word salad bar extremism. These individuals are not clearly aligned with any one ideology completely, but they seem to be assembling fragments of memes, of conspiracies, of cultural signals. Into an unstable identity. And in some cases now, it's exploding into violence. I think the most troubling consequence isn't just the facts themselves, which is abhorrent and I feel incredibly bad for all of Charlie's friends and his family and his children, obviously himself. But beyond the act itself, there's an enormously chilling effect, I think, on public discourse. When you express an idea, it cannot be that then you risk becoming a target.
Because the ultimate outcome of that is fewer people will then enter the public debate. And then what happens is the range of acceptable dialogue really narrows, and it only leaves space then for the most benign voices in the public square. And if you have that kind of anodyne discussion, I just think you have very bad outcomes for society.
I've watched a lot of his content since he was murdered, and I'm still trying to grapple with why people could not shout the man down if they disagreed with him and instead shot the man down. And I think that that is a completely unacceptable response for what he thought. That's what I mean.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:46)
Well said. Friedberg, your?

**David Friedberg** (3:49)
I think it wasn't his controversy, it was his effectiveness. He was too smart, too open, too honest, too willing to engage in discourse, too willing to debate. He was too effective in changing people's minds. And I think that's why he became such a cultural threat. And it wasn't necessarily the things he said, because there are people out there who say far more controversial things than Charlie. It's that he sounded sensible and he changed people's minds through his discourse. And as he changed people's minds, I think he became a real threat to the ideologies that he spoke up against.
And I think that's why he was targeted. And it's obvious that if he wasn't as effective as he is, if he wasn't as smart, as empathetic, as optimistic, as honest, as direct as he was, he wouldn't have been a target, perhaps. And it was very sad. One of the things that we've seen is the power of going direct, sort of like what we did with this podcast. He went direct. He went to college campuses, but he also recorded it and put it on the internet, and millions of people saw it. And that new form of media, that new form of communication, where someone can actually have a town square, the internet, that they can stand at and speak their mind and be heard, there's no longer these filters and these controlling powers of influence that decide what we get to know and not know, and what our opinions need to be. The media and the traditional kind of systems are being degraded. I think it's important to continue that. And I think one of the things that I've been optimistic about, I was very sad and angry the day this happened. I called Chamath, I was actually tearful that day. But since that time, I think it's been amazing to see the optimism, not just from one side, but from a lot of different people from different backgrounds, standing up and saying discourse is so important and re-underwriting this American process. So I'm very sad, but I'm very hopeful that people take this as a sign of how important this discourse is.